willow
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09:31:08 am on July 9, 2008 | # | |
All right, let’s go there. In another thread Andrea suggested we devote a discussion to white converts–what we mean, what we hijack, how we’re useful or not. I will observe something that will make me unpopular among others of my ilk: a lot of educated white converts (in other words, ones who grew up with a certain amount of implicit cultural authority) use their conversion as an excuse to analyze subjects with which they have no experience: honor killing, arranged marriage, poverty. They function, and to a certain extent see themselves, as religiously privileged anthropologists. There is a reason for this that is understandable: one wants to simply tack a Muslim identity on to one’s existing identity, which gives one a comfortable cushion of implied expertise.
The problem, besides a level of inherent obnoxiousness, is that this muddles up existent identity politics. In the West, Islam is deeply tied to ideas of race, cultural identity and immigration. When white converts come in, rhetorical guns blazing, to talk about Who Muslims Are and Are Not, the narrative gets skewed. Thirty years of postcolonial activism, meant to take the Muslim/non-western narrative out of the hands of white scholars and put it back in the hands of the people who live it, becomes confused. The unspoken bottom line is this: to some people, the fact that white Muslims exist is very inconvenient.
My solution: we, educated white converts, have to accept that we don’t get a unified cultural identity. We just don’t. Not this generation. If we work hard, our kids will. We no longer fit seamlessly into the white majority and we can’t tack ourselves on to the immigrant/emergent American/British community, because *we’re not from there*. (Hello? White dude in the thobe with the fake foreign accent? I’m talking to you.) We are, for now, identity-less. Rather than denying it, moaning about it or getting a martyr complex about it, we should accept it, poke our heads up and see how this can be useful.
Next: How to Be White, Muslim and Vocal Without Co-opting Everything
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BK 9:49 am on July 9, 2008 | #
Alhamduleelah! Just by being white, I escape the shackles of my false identity and associations. Is there no end to white benefits?
aziz 10:30 am on July 9, 2008 | #
I think that a “unified cultural identity” is an illusion to begin with. You can find it in smaller groups (like Bohras) who have both ethnic and religious uniformity, but scale up and you inevitably find schism of some sort. I think that a lot of the idea that there needs ot be any sort of unified cultural identity comes from the same idealised vision of Ummah that everyone talks about in the abstract (but which in practice usually boils down to, check your moral reasoning at the door and blindly support my cause because we both profess Shahada).
Ultimately, whether you are white or not does not fully exclude you from lending your opinion on matters of import to all muslims. Whether issues like honor killing etc are “muslim issues” is another matter entirely; I argue that they are unequivocally not, that they are universal “women’s issues” and that both men and women have something meaningful to say about it (since both genders are, after all, involved).
Likewise with arranged marriage and poverty - these are issues that are fundamentally orthogonal to the idea of muslim identity - even among those muslims who experience them! After all, honor killing is not a mainstream practice, its a criminal one, and goes agaist all mainstream Islamic teachings. Arranegd marriages are deeply cultural practices and they arent always “bad”. As far as poverty goes, thats about as universal an issue as you can find.
Where white converts specificlaly come into play with respect to these issues of culture and class is in how they (you) lead by example. If I, speaking as a brown, try to use myself as an example for how honor killing is not tolerated among mainsztream muslim communities, I will be dismissed because the ones doing the honor killings are also brown. Arguments like those of Apostate are that the misogyny is intrinsic to Islam; its white converts to Islam who provide the valid counterexample.
In many ways, white convert are at the vanguard of integrating Islamic and Western identities. I can always immerse myself in my ethnic community, but you have no such safe harbor. You have to build your community from scratch, whereas I just inherited mine.
I think that the Internet will turn out to be a critical place for that genesis.
Willow 11:21 am on July 9, 2008 | #
I wasn’t trying to lump arranged marriage into a category of ‘bad things’ (We all know, or are in, arranged marriages that are perfectly functional and content), simply into a category of experiences that falls totally outside the parameters of mainstream middle/upper-middle class white America. Poverty is universal to all cultures, but in Muslim communities takes on a particular flavor (usually as a seminal reason why things like honor killing/other cruel or ignorant practices exist).
You don’t suddenly gain insight into these things simply by taking the shehada, is my point. Even if one does eventually come to a more articulate understanding, of, say, arranged marriage–by exposure to more people, by living abroad, whatever–I tend to think that knowledge should be applied to personal experience rather than the endless rounds of anthropologizing. (There’s a new verb for you.) Ie, your ‘knowledge’ of arranged marriage should mean you know better than to ask your south asian coworker how she met her husband because the inquiry might be rude. It should not mean that you run out and write a panting novel about arranged marriage, knowing that “the author is a convert to Islam” will lend it legitimacy.
(The affect of identity on art is something I think a lot about, for obvious reasons.)
You have to build your community from scratch
That’s Part II…the upshot of not having a prefab community/identity is, I think, that you can construct a community of individuals rather than generalities. This is the blessing in the rootlessness. You can give Islam legitimacy as a lived experience, a personal experience–this, unlike theological and political arguments for Islam, is unsinkable.
You are my community.
razib 12:52 pm on July 9, 2008 | #
a minor note: there is white, and there is White. most arabs, turks and persians pretty much think of themselves as white in comparison to south asians and africans and southeast asians.* so what you’re really talking about are europeans; though again that gets confusing because there indigenous european muslims of non-convert origin (albanians, balkan turks and slavs). finally, turks often identify as european.
it’s complicated, though i think your heuristic works to the first approximation.
* a south asian muslims always “looks muslim” no matter how he/she dresses. in fact, south asian non-muslims always “look muslim” too. this is not true for black, southeast and east asian muslims, and it is not really true for many middle eastern muslims who can easily “pass” for southern european (e.g., the lebanese actor tony shaloub regularly plays italians in films & TV).
Muse 1:02 pm on July 9, 2008 | #
If I, speaking as a brown, try to use myself as an example for how honor killing is not tolerated among mainsztream muslim communities, I will be dismissed because the ones doing the honor killings are also brown. Arguments like those of Apostate are that the misogyny is intrinsic to Islam; its white converts to Islam who provide the valid counterexample.
Muse 1:03 pm on July 9, 2008 | #
sigh. blast this html. i’ll figure it out one day.
Muse 1:57 pm on July 9, 2008 | #
Quote by Suhaib Webb from this article.
http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=7801
“All of us, whether you like it or not, here [in the East] we are representatives of the West; [over] there, we are representatives of the East. Although I’m definitely not Eastern: My hair is blond, my eyes are blue. But immediately people assume I have experience with the East because I’m Muslim.”
Willow 2:04 pm on July 9, 2008 | #
I actually liked the inverted block-commenting.
It was refreshing.
Re: born Muslims choosing Islam: I would be very interested to read your thoughts. There is formidable wisdom in choosing what you have been given. Especially in a culture that celebrates rebellion and rejecting norms and soforth.
I think Muse is right about the particularly horrible things associated with Muslim women…I remember walking past a group of high school girls in Egypt once and thinking “I wonder how many of them are thinking ‘Gee is this the day I’m gonna git honor-killed?’” I cracked up just thinking about it, the idea was so ridiculous. When you see born, nonwhite, non-English-speaking as-Muslim-as-Muslim women going about their daily lives the absurdity of the question becomes readily apparent.
If a white woman, on the other hand, says “Honor killing is not an everyday occurrence in the Muslim world”, the whole discussion becomes slightly meaningless. Our own families don’t care much how we behave as long as we’re not hurting ourselves or others. Even assuming we were tied to the ‘honor’ of a ‘traditional’ Muslim family by marriage, we could perform the most horrifying act of lewd human theater imaginable and still probably be okay. Not even the most table-thumpingly asinine of Muslim patriarchs wants to run afoul of the American/British/German/Canadian govt by murdering one of its citizens.
BK 2:28 pm on July 9, 2008 | #
The most adamant adversaries I have experienced, over and over again, to “misogynistic Islam” are white men.
I am talking about talks about Islam at a Berkeley Zen center or Vedanta Retreats.
These guys need to put a big stinky sock in it. One guy would not let a Muslim woman doctor on stage speak and left in a huff cuz he was so outraged about the treatment of women in Islam. From a Zen center! And she is an example of what Islam is supposedly missing according to him! An inveiled, educated leader in Islam. Eff him! Idiots!
Women’s Rights in Islam can be code for alot of neocon agenda anyway. Ayan Hirsi Ali is the Premier Tool of Tools for this propaganda, but there are many little minions and imitators out there “dying” for attention.
Politics, white guilt, white outrage and racism all have their place…..apart from Islam.
I am happy to be white, happy to be Muslim, happy to keep my politics completely separate from my religious life. Palestine plays no part in my search for allegiance and knowledge of God.
That is a social justice issue. Conflating everything and calling it “Islam” just indicates a hollowness in religion. IM(H)O
Fatemeh 3:55 pm on July 9, 2008 | #
Though I agree that there it’s a bigger “deal” for a brown man to murder a white woman, I think race is a factor more than nationality/citizenship. Wasn’t Aqsa Pervez a Canadian citizen? Wasn’t Sandeela Kanwal an American citizen? Brown people aren’t considered “real” American/British/German/Canadian citizens, because they’re not white.
razib 4:03 pm on July 9, 2008 | #
American/British/German/Canadian citizens
there are a lot of differences across countries. i’d put the rank order toward acceptability of non-whites as “real” as america & canadian > british > german. american and canadian muslims are more multiracial/cultural than british (mostly brown) or german (mostly turk) so easy essentialization is harder (about 20% of american muslims are black americans, who despite their marginalization are not foreign obviously and not perceived as such).
Willow 4:23 pm on July 9, 2008 | #
Though I agree that there it’s a bigger “deal” for a brown man to murder a white woman, I think race is a factor more than nationality/citizenship. Wasn’t Aqsa Pervez a Canadian citizen? Wasn’t Sandeela Kanwal an American citizen? Brown people aren’t considered “real” American/British/German/Canadian citizens, because they’re not white.
By the government, or by their parents? The fathers of Sandeela and Aqsa aren’t getting off without prosecution because their daughters are non-white…
Mr Moo 5:05 pm on July 9, 2008 | #
Taking British Muslims as a case study: Let us examine three issues, namely the positioning of white converts, their ‘usefulness’ and the commenting of cultural issues that may affect some Muslims but not them.
Culture - from the half-dozen white converts I know well, culturally they end up taking on the culture of whatever family they marry into or are ‘adopted’ by. There was a discussion about this on the Islam Channel a good few years ago.
Positioning of white converts
converts have been subsumed into the Deobandi/Barelwi/Ikhwani/Salafi communities
some converts have tried to form white cultural assocations (The Association of British Muslims springs to mind)
other converts have decided to bypass both the above trends and become what I term ‘post-group’ converts, eschewing existing groups to create their own networks - as Willow describes above.
Commenting in the UK
Two of the main commentators in the blogosphere are Yahya Birt and Matthew Smith of Indigo Jo fame. The editor of the national Muslim magazine ‘emel’ is also a convert and no one seems to mind them commenting as long as they are fair and accurate.
Which brings me to an added point: Reverse psychology and converts. In the UK, converts are often pushed to the front of the stage, purely because there is an subconscious impression that culture is removed - as the essentialized convert speaks, it must be authentic Islam and not foreign baggage. The convert ‘chose’ Islam, thus are authentic in in their Islamicity. This process works in other ways - for example the habit of Rev. Michael Nazir Ali, to criticize Islam - because he is brown, his comments can’t be racist.
Fatemeh 5:30 pm on July 9, 2008 | #
Speaking specifically within your assertion that a “brown” man would be more hesitant to murder a white Western woman, I thought immediately of the media’s portrayal. When domestic violence is perpetrated by someone of color on a white person, it’s a huge-ass deal in the media. This can be reflected in court sentences: the difference between minimum and maximum sentences is sometimes skin color.
But then there’s also the portrayals of Aqsa and Sandeela as very “westernized” and almost whitewashed, used in contrast with their scary brown foreign fathers who are Muzlim. It can go lots of ways.
It wasn’t my intent to hijack the thread, sorry. I agree with your assertions about white convert Muslim privilege, and I’m interested in Razib’s point about black American Muslims, which makes me wonder how they fit into convert Muslim “privilege”. And since I’m not a white or black convert, Imma shut up now.